Foveated rendering exploits the falloff in acuity of the human eye at the visual periphery to conserve power and computing resources used to generate digital images for display to users, e.g., to display augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) using a head mounted device (HMD). In foveated rendering, a user's central gaze direction is determined, either as the center of a current field-of-view or using eye tracking to determine where the user is looking. The user's field-of-view is then subdivided into a high-acuity region that surrounds the central gaze direction and one or more lower-acuity regions in the visual periphery. The high-acuity region includes a portion of the field-of-view that is within a first angular distance of the central gaze direction. The angular distance from the central gaze direction is referred to as the eccentricity. The lower-acuity regions include portions of the field-of-view that are at larger eccentricities. For example, the high-acuity region can include a portion of the field-of-view that is within an eccentricity of 5-10°, which corresponds to a portion of the field-of-view that projects to a retinal region in the human eye called the fovea. Pixels are rendered at high resolution within the high-acuity region, e.g., by rendering the pixels at a resolution corresponding to the native resolution supported by the display. Pixels in the low-acuity regions at eccentricities larger than 5-10° are rendered at lower resolutions, thereby reducing the power and computing resources needed to render the pixels. The rendered pixels in the low-acuity regions can subsequently be upsampled to generate display pixels at the native resolution of the display.